Bakunin's log

[Bakunin]

Crossing the Black Sea on my way back home after two intense weeks in Thailand working on new language projects is a good time to write an update for my badly neglected log here on LLORG…

At the moment, there’s so much happening, I don’t even know where to start. Over the past one or two years, my focus has shifted to exploring how the acquisition of unwritten languages can be facilitated over the internet. Last year, I started with an illustrations project but quickly realized that I need to complement these little stories of everyday activities with two more basic illustrations projects, one which covers basic vocabulary and another one basic communicative functions. Ever since I got working on these two beginner projects, I had been looking forward to this trip to Thailand, knowing that I would have enough material to start in earnest with unwritten languages.

I was pretty confident that I could get something going with an Isaan-speaking friend of mine. Isaan is the variety of Lao spoken in North-Eastern Thailand by about 20 million people; it’s pretty close to Thai, probably closer than Swiss-German is to Standard German. And it turned out as expected; we’ve started recordings for the two beginner projects, and I’m learning along as I publish these materials. I know that there is some demand for Isaan language learning materials because many Westerners are married to Isaan women, and some are interested in the language. I’m sure not everybody will find my stuff useful - after all I stay fully monolingual - but given that there’s so little serious material available, I hope that some people will benefit.

I find Isaan fascinating and have the ambition to learn the language. I’ve always loved Isaan food (and much prefer it to food from the Thai-speaking parts of Thailand) and the people, and I’ve spent more time in Isaan than in any other part of Thailand. I’ll take it easy for the moment, taking my time to get used to the tonal system and the overall pronunciation.

The other language I wanted to get started with was Northern Khmer. When we were working on the documentary project in Buriram province in February, I noticed that one of the young guys helping us used Khmer with his peers in the village. In 2015, I had struggled and eventually failed to find a Northern Khmer tutor in Surin, meeting many young people who had already transitioned to Thai. So meeting a student who was using Khmer as a daily language with his peers was an opportunity I had to take advantage of. I sneaked in a test session with him during our shooting and arranged to come back in May.

It turned out that he isn’t too confident in his Khmer language. I think he has a good command of it, but he exhibits a few typical issues of a beginning transition. In particular his pronunciation is very Thai already, and he doesn’t always remember the Khmer words for things. But he brought a friend, about 25, a Thai teacher, who has a markedly more conservative pronunciation, speaks more fluently and also seems to have a larger vocabulary. The two are now working together, and I think this is a great arrangement. I’ve observed them interacting and discussing vocabulary and pronunciation, and I think both benefit from this set-up.

Northern Khmer is an interesting language. I can understand a lot; almost everything in the picture-supported recordings, and a lot (but definitively not everything) in a few other recordings which I let them do to support the communicative functions project. There are many interesting differences to Central Khmer, and I’m looking forward to developing a better sense for them over time.

One day, we went out to their village and spent some time driving around on our motorbikes. We observed an old man fishing for his dinner in a shallow reservoir. He had a few traditional objects with him, for instance a special container made from bamboo to store the fish (ข้อง in Thai). We talked a bit about the Khmer names for his equipment. I’d love to be able to do some recordings on traditional ways to farm, fish, do handicraft etc. with older people in Khmer, or record traditional or other stories in a few years…

Dinner is coming, then we’ll land. I have to finish this post now.

[Hanuman]

Awesome to see how well all your projects are currently going! I'll definitely be taking a look at the Isaan resources you put together, like you said there is such dearth of learning materials.

There's something about Isaan that is really interesting. Even little things like the differences in tone and pitch make it pretty enjoyable to listen to. I'm the same for Isaan food as well, my wife always jokes that I should have married an Isaan Thai because I love the food so much.

[Bakunin]

@Hanuman: Yes, I also love the tones of Isaan, they sounds funny and endearing. At the moment, I’m not doing much with the recordings other than listen to them carefully before uploading… I’m planning to do more later. But I’m definitively learning vocabulary as I listen, I’ve already picked up a lot of interesting little differences to Thai. I also think I seem to start recognizing tones, but I wouldn’t be able to tell you how many there are… it seems like 6-ish but I could be wrong, and unlike Thai there seem to be changes when words are combined - but I could be wrong about that as well.

Tutoring sessions
I’ve never managed to develop a stable program for tutoring, and that’s probably not a bad thing. Mixing things up, trying new stuff, is fun. So here’s what I’ve done in my last two tutoring sessions:

In Thai (60 minutes), I had my usual 20-30 minutes of small talk about this and that, this time mainly my upcoming travels to Thailand (this was before my trip). Then we went through the comments under a political article on FB. It was a bit frustrating, I had full comprehension of only about every second comment. Creative spelling, swear words / insults, and references to figures or events I’m not familiar with play a role, but I also lack a lot of slang vocabulary. I’ve done FB comments before, and I will do it again, but I think I will do something else in my next session…

In my last Khmer session (90 minutes) earlier this week I did the following: I started with a section “my day” for about 10 minutes. Then we went through a number of basic communicative function pictures and did example dialogues and role play (20 minutes).

Screen Shot 2016-06-11 at 22.39.58.png

Next we spent about 30 minutes on a wordless picture book. We described the pictures together and wrote a few simple sentences for each picture. Then we did about 10 minutes of hand writing; I’m trying to learn to write the characters, but I’m not overly ambitious - typing is much easier and way more useful. The remaining 20 minutes were spent taking turns asking questions about one of the basic vocabulary illustrations (page 3).

Screen Shot 2016-06-11 at 22.41.10.png

I’ve particularly enjoyed the wordless picture book activity and I’m planning to review my notes a few times to learn the spelling of key words. I generally try to keep the descriptions and sentences in familiar terrain, and there were only two new words in the whole exercise so far. This activity is about activating vocabulary and getting into speaking. The book I’m using is one of the easiest books I have, Un petit nuage by Muzo, published by autrement.

Un petit nuage 01.png

[aeroflot]

Thanks for the reply, Bakunin! I'll be following your log, too.

[Bakunin]

I'm playing around with vowel charts... ultimately, I'm working on getting a better grasp of Khmer phonology and in particular how the writing system reflects the big (middle-Khmer?) sound shift resulting in the two consonant series. But in order to get the hang of vowel charts, I've started with my mother tongue, German. I hadn't realized we have so many different vowel sounds, but they all make total sense when systematized in the vowel chart.

I couldn't find a vowel chart with example words, so I built one myself:

GermanVowelTrapezSmall.png

[Bakunin]

I've learned to hand-write Khmer over the past couple of weeks. I'm far from having learned all the characters - there are still many which I've never put onto paper - but I do have the basics down. Prior to this, I could already read pretty well and also know how to type at a basic level.

Here's what has worked and what hasn't:

At first, I tried to work through a schoolbook teaching the characters in their "alphabet" order. That order is useful to understand the relation between the characters and their pronunciation (and perfect to link the Khmer writing system to related Brahmic scripts like Thai), but it is a bad order in terms of usage frequency. It also takes ages until you get to some of the most widely used words because the book introduces certain complex features of the writing system (subscript forms of consonants) only after covering all normal consonants and vowels - however, most Khmer words use these complex features. Most example words were thus meaningless to me or just arbitrary gibberish ("ga ka go ko"). I never managed to stick to a regular schedule and rarely reviewed my little writing exercises. I failed to learn to write with this approach.

Then I changed gears. I took a short sentence ("Hi guys!") and set out to learn to write this sentence. All the complexities of the Khmer writing system were thrown at me at once: subscript versions of the characters, vowels in random order, special characters and diacritics. I dealt with them one by one and slowly worked through the first word, then the second, then the first short phrase and so on. It was easy to stick with it and I even practised my little phrases at odd times during the day. Only a few full sentences were enough to get me where I'm now: to a basic level, with confidence that I'm able to close the gap which still remains.

Why did the second approach work but the first didn't? I think it has to do with two factors: meaning, and frequency.

"Ga ka go ko" may be the most basic syllables to write, but they don't have any meaning to me and aren't at all interesting to practice. They don't stick. "Hi guys!" however has a lot of meaning, is interesting to practise and memorable. I never wrote "ga ka go ko" during a free minute at work, but I found myself jotting down "Hi guys" and all the other little phrases I've been working on several times during the day (usually focusing on one phrase per day).

The other factor is frequency. Learning to handwrite obscure characters which I'd rarely seen in hundreds of thousands of words read to this date felt pretty abstract and useless. Having to wade through a sizeable set of those before even coming to the super-important but slightly complex subscript versions was demotivating. In contrast to that, all the characters in "Hi guys!" have already appeared many times in other phrases I've worked on simply because frequent characters tend to be frequent.

I've seen this in other domains of language learning as well that I learn best by ignoring "systematic" approaches in the beginning and rather focus on things which are meaningful to me right now and which I can relate back to other learning activities (in this case: phrases and sentences from my studies) but which may seem random from a more knowledgeable perspective. I tend to come back later to systematize and consolidate my knowledge, but I learn best by first getting a foot in the door on my own terms.

[Bakunin]

Unwritten languages - some random thoughts

Just to get it out of the way: I’ve already learned an unwritten language to an advanced level, Swiss-German, but since it is very close to my native German, I don’t want to draw too many lessons from that.

For some time, I’ve been interested in unwritten languages, and in particular how their learning can be supported with online materials. I’ve explored some of the approaches out there, most of which have been or are being developed by missionaries. Being active in a field, language learning of minority languages, which could help missionaries to increase their impact is a constant source of tension for me; I’ve already had unpleasant encounters with missionaries in the developing world and have been told, for instance, that I’m possessed by satan because I’m gay and other crap. It is an unfortunate fact that many people who are interested in minority languages come with the explicit objective to destroy these cultures and spread their ideology of intolerance and hatred.

I’ve been looking into picture-supported language learning because that’s one of the few mediums I can think of to support the learning of unwritten languages, especially if one wants to avoid the use of a bridge language (a dominant language or local lingua franca).

I’ve been briefly working on Northern Khmer (but have stopped for now as I want to get my Central Khmer to a better level first) and Isaan, a variety of Lao spoken in North-Eastern Thailand. Both these languages are dominated by and shifting towards Thai. One of the biggest problems for me is to gauge whether the use of a loanword from the dominant language in a particular recording is authentic (in the sense that this word would be used between native speakers of the minority language) or influenced by diglossia or the fact that I communicate in Thai, and the speaker is in a half-Thai mindset when doing the recordings for me.

I also often have the case that I hear two words, one Thai and the other from the minority language, used seemingly interchangeably. When I ask the speaker, they usually say both can be used and are understood; that’s an answer which doesn’t help me at all - it can be true, or not. The only way to find out is to eavesdrop on massive amounts of native speaker conversation but that’s close to impossible from abroad. Asking the speaker to avoid these Thai words may also be wrong as they may be genuinely used in the minority language. So I guess I have to be content to get the local word at least in some recordings and trust that I can work out proper usage later.

Sound quality is another issue I’m sometimes battling with. Speakers of minority languages are often from disadvantaged backgrounds and don’t have access to good quality recording equipment (like a modern smartphone with original headphones). But technology is trickling down, so this problem goes away over time, I guess.

More serious is the fact that I need to work with the speakers I have. It’s usually difficult for me to find speakers to work with as I’m not based in the communities, and if I have someone who can do the recordings and is ok with the general conditions, I need to make do with what that person delivers. On the Isaan project, for instance, I’m generally happy with one project (which I publish) as I provide relatively detailed instructions. But I’ve been trying in private to develop free-form story telling - because that’s the next project - but that hasn’t worked too well so far. Not everybody is a great story teller; and it’s a difficult skill to teach, at least for me, from abroad and through Thai. I’m going to give it a few more weeks or months, but I may have to look for another speaker if it doesn’t work out.

On a more personal level, I’ve developed a fascination with Central Khmer and really want to work on that language most of the time. There are various factors which drive that: the really interesting phonology, the fact that the Khmer empire was huge and massively influential in the past but is now completely irrelevant (a bit like Greece in a European context), the large influence Khmer had on Thai, to name three; and also that Khmer is a very important base language for the other minority languages from the region I’m interested in. Central Khmer, which is a written language, of course, currently “keeps me” from doing more with Isaan. Maybe the fact that having access to a writing system, dictionaries, websites etc. which makes learning so much easier has to do with it as well.

By the same token, I’ve entertained the idea of learning Lao first before continuing with Isaan. Same argument: it’s an important base language for Isaan (Isaan is a variety of Lao), it is written, it has a standard, dictionaries etc. Unwritten minority languages are much less tangible, unfortunately.

So, all in all, mixed progress with unwritten languages to this date. I’m all set up, I guess, but haven’t quite put in the effort yet.

[Hanuman]

I have also juggled with the thought of going Lao before Isaan, but that was mainly because the Vientiene dialect of Lao is pretty much the same as the Nong Khai dialect of Isaan which my step daughter speaks. I believe the Nong Khai dialect is different from that spoken in the rest of the North East like Udon, Surin, Khon Kaen etc but my comprehension is still so basic I'm not really sure of the breadth of differences or nuances in tonal changes between the various regions. When I did spend an hour or so looking through the Lao alphabet though it was really quit easy to get my head around, not to mention aesthetically pleasing.

[Bakunin]

I have also juggled with the thought of going Lao before Isaan, but that was mainly because the Vientiene dialect of Lao is pretty much the same as the Nong Khai dialect of Isaan which my step daughter speaks. I believe the Nong Khai dialect is different from that spoken in the rest of the North East like Udon, Surin, Khon Kaen etc but my comprehension is still so basic I'm not really sure of the breadth of differences or nuances in tonal changes between the various regions. When I did spend an hour or so looking through the Lao alphabet though it was really quit easy to get my head around, not to mention aesthetically pleasing.

Yeah, I can relate to that... I guess, Isaan is everywhere a bit different. I have no real insight into other Isaan dialects but the tone shifts I observe in Ton's speech are pretty regular. There is a so-called Gedney chart out there which systematically groups words based on their phonology, and it turns out that these groups often have the same tone in any given Tai language (the language family comprising Thai, Lao, Shan etc.). All in all there are 20 groups, but of course every language will have the same tone for several groups as no Tai language has more than 7 or so tones. I was planning to look into these Gedney categories next time I'm in Thailand. Stuart Jay Ray has also talked about this in his videos, you may be familiar with the concept.

Learning Lao is an enticing idea. It seems relatively easy and, as you say, aesthetically pleasing. Lao apparently has many different dialects, too. I would assume that Khon Kaen Isaan isn't too far from Vientiane Lao either, but the lexical differences will be much greater than just across the border in Nong Khai. Thai is clearly filtering in, especially in the Isaan of the younger generation which consumes a lot of Thai language media and spends time in Central Thailand to study or work.

I should not start with Lao, though. I want to focus on Khmer and get to a decent level before adding another language. I tend to spread myself too thin and that has never done me any good in the long run...

[Hanuman]

I should not start with Lao, though. I want to focus on Khmer and get to a decent level before adding another language. I tend to spread myself too thin and that has never done me any good in the long run...

Tell me about it. I just can't dedicate enough time to Isaan at this stage as it is, let alone adding Lao to the equation.